More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.
Come to where the flavor is, come to Marlboro Country!
CIGARETTE SLOGANS
We tend to take it for granted, and find it hard to imagine a world without, but branding on a broad scale is an invention of the nineteenth century. And the grand curse and creation of the Americas. Ivory soap was one of the first: Procter and Gamble launched its campaign to market a “99.44 percent pure” mix of lye and fat in 1882, by which time there were only a few other branded consumer products sold nationwide. Americans in different parts of the country could buy Uneeda Biscuits, Paine’s Vegetable Compound, Royal Baking Powder, and the like, but widely advertised and standardized consumables were just beginning to emerge—along with coast-to-coast marketing.
Advertising grew with the spread of newspapers and (later) popular magazines, as new packaging and transport technologies made it possible to attach name brands to common household goods. Coca-Cola was invented in 1886 and by the end of the century was available from Atlanta to Los Angeles. W. K. Kellogg launched his first national cereal in 1906 (in Ladies’ Home Journal), and R. J. Reynolds began marketing Prince Albert (roll-your-own) tobacco nationwide one year later.1 And though many such brands were destined to fail, several of the winners had spectacular careers. A 1920 study of the most popular revealed a host of names still familiar today: Kodak cameras, Singer sewing machines, Campbell’s soup, Wrigley’s chewing gum, Colgate toothpaste, and Welch’s grape juice, for example.2
And Camel cigarettes.
Camel cigarettes were unveiled by the R. J. Reynolds Company in 1913, following a billboard and newspaper blitz announcing “the Camels are coming.” Oriental themes were already common in the trade, with prized brands having names like Sultan, Omar, Fatima, Mecca, Murad, and Mogul, advertised with tropical or desert backgrounds and sultry women in suggestive poses. Cigarettes were not yet as popular as pipes or even cigars, but the trend was clearly upward: only 2.5 billion cigarettes were smoked in the United States at the turn of the century, but by the end of the “war to end all wars” Camels alone would be selling ten times that (see the box on this page).
And with this came the great “shakeout,” as local trademarks succumbed to the onslaught of standard brands. A German manufacturer has estimated there were thirty thousand different brands of cigarettes by World War I, with some of this efflorescence stemming from efforts to discourage counterfeiting (Susini and Sons in Cuba, for example, routinely changed its wrappers to stymie European fakers.) Cigarettes were locally rolled and playful by design, with odd and curious brand names like Fire Cracker, Freckled Squaw, and Sour Grapes. Some were flagrantly libertine or even comic, thumbing their noses at fuddy-duddy prohibitionists: so we have fin-de-siècle cigarettes with names like Christian Comfort, Coffin Nail, and Forbidden Fruit. Cigarettes were often considered an effete or sissy smoke by comparison with cigars or pipes, whence macho brands like Police Club, Carrie’s Hatchet, and Scalping Knife.3 R. J. Reynolds’s nationally advertised Camel brand forced many of these smaller marks out of business; some were bought up by the bigger boys, but most just vanished without a trace.
Hungry for the same kind of success as Reynolds, the companies reborn from the Duke empire breakup established their own flagship brands. Liggett & Myers rolled out Chesterfields in 1912, and three years later began a Camels-style national campaign. The American Tobacco Company launched its Lucky Strike brand in 1917, crafting it to appeal to women as well as men. Camels, Luckies, and Chesterfields would dominate for decades, capturing 88 percent of the U.S. market by 1930, though Lorillard did pretty well with its rejuvenated Old Gold, transformed into a “standard brand” in 1926. Brown & Williamson broke into the majors in 1933 with its menthol-flavored Kool, a cigarette later popular with—because of deliberate marketing to—African Americans.4 The explosive growth of smoking didn’t lift all boats, but it did mean that brands selling less than a billion per year were no longer considered “significant.”
Slogans. Key for these early brands were carefully crafted slogans. Smokers were said to be willing to “walk a mile for a Camel,” a catchphrase developed in 1921 for Reynolds by the Ayer Advertising Agency, already famous for coining Morton Salt’s: “When It Rains It Pours.” (The same company later won with de Beers’s “A diamond is forever” and the U.S. Army’s “Be all you can be.”) Luckies’ signature was, “It’s toasted,” joined later by its “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet!”—which irritated candy makers to no end.5 (One might even wonder whether candy cigarettes were a kind of compensation to candy makers for the “Reach . . . sweet” slight.) Chesterfield’s was originally “They do satisfy,” later condensed (in 1915) to “They satisfy.”
Some slogans make you want to scratch your head, they sound so odd. The American Tobacco Company in 1931, for example, ran a series of ads boasting that its “toasting” process expelled the “sheep-dip base naturally present in every tobacco leaf.” The background here is convoluted and has to be understood in terms of how tobacco leaves were processed. The crucial fact is that in the process of steam heating prior to manufacture (“toasting”), some pretty awful gases are released. This was taken as evidence that toasting “purified” the leaves used in Lucky Strike cigarettes. Tobacco manufacturers collected and condensed these foul, acrid gases and sold them in liquid form to farmers as an insecticide for livestock: “sheep dip.” Sheep would then be driven into large vats of this smelly stuff, usually with a jump-off from a platform of some sort to make sure their heads got submerged. This “sheep dip” from “toasting” killed whatever lice, ticks, or fleas might be on the animals—which certainly was better, or so we were led to believe, than inhaling that same stuff with our favorite cigarette. Whence the value of “toasting” and its sheep-dip defense.
Advertisers eventually realized that positive images sell better than negative, though the lesson has never been perfectly learned. R. J. Reynolds as recently as 1973 praised its Focus cigarettes for delivering “no more plastic taste”—which helps explain why nothing much came of this clumsily handled brand. Philip Morris fared much better with its “Call for Philip Morris,” rung out by a diminutive hotel bellhop named Johnny Roventini. A charming four-foot gentleman, Roventini was “discovered” by an adman in the New Yorker Hotel in 1933, whereupon he was hired to croon his signature “Call for Philip Maw-ree-ass” on radio shows beamed to every corner of the nation. As “the world’s first living trademark,” Roventini eventually traveled the country for his cigarette superiors, dining with President Eisenhower and talking politics with Richard Nixon, all the while smoking Marlboros. He has often been called a “dwarf” but was actually a midget—and referred to himself as a “Lilliputian.” Roventini didn’t seem to mind being turned into a kind of one-man tobacco-ad freak show; with his image on countless billboards, magazine ads, and cardboard cutouts, Philip Morris credited him with supplanting the cigar store Indian, the once-ubiquitous ornament of the smoke shop.6
Tobacco makers have always been careful to match up slogans with popular sentiments: patriotism in times of war, feminism in times of emancipation, savings in times of hardship, medical reassurance in eras of “health scares,” and so forth. Cigarettes are equated with “risk” when they want to capture the imagination of masculine youth, with slimness or “diets” or glamour to capture the female cigarette “vote.” Whatever will sell—and by whatever means.
Indeed it is probably fair to say that the industry invented much of modern marketing. Tobacco manufacturers were the first to advertise using color lithography (in the 1850s) and among the first to use coupons and photo inserts (cigarette cards) to attract customers. Cigarettes were the first items advertised by skywriting and also the first products sold using billboard panel photolithography (in the 1970s). Tobacco mongers pioneered animated cartoons (for use in movie theaters) along with product placements in Hollywood films, “impulse buying” in grocery stores (by clever shelf placement), human trademarks such as Roventini, “graphic branding” on towels and the like, brand-linked merchandising of items such as T-shirts and coats (in Marlboro stores) and even product-linked vacations and “expeditions” (Marlboro Adventure Teams and Camel Expeditions, as we shall see). Cigarette paper makers got into this act: the Rizla company, a subsidiary of Imperial Tobacco Ltd., in 1996 launched “Rizlaware,” a line of clothing intended to promote its roll-your-own cigarette papers. It also created Rizla Suzuki, a road bike racing team. In 2005 alone Rizla sold enough rolling paper to circle the earth some fifty-two times, or to make a continuous path from the earth to the moon and back three times.7
Tobacco cards. Tobacco cards were an early triumph from the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Stiff cardboard inserts had been used to keep cigarette packs from being crushed; manufacturers eventually realized these were ideal surfaces for ads and that if the designs were fine enough people would collect them. By the 1870s manufacturers were printing thematic series onto such cards—famous Indian chiefs or pin-up queens, for example, or dog breeds or presidents or heroes of baseball or boxing or some other sport. These were popular in a nascent era of collecting and indeed must have helped spawn such crazes, judging from the plethora now offered at any given moment on eBay. The gimmick soon spread into Europe, with cards eventually featuring “the German army” and “pictures of the Führer” and hundreds of other themes. The world’s first baseball cards were actually stiffeners in cigarette packs; a recent history of the topic notes, “The tobacco industry is responsible for baseball cards as we know them today.”8
Skywriting and Skycasting. Another innovation was introduced in 1923, when a state-of-the-art biplane flew over Times Square in New York City, spelling out “Lucky Strike” in giant, mile-high letters. Major Jack Savage from Britain was paid a thousand dollars for each six-minute flight, but the American Tobacco Company apparently judged it worth the expense, given the sensational press coverage. The campaign was quickly extended nationwide, with 122 cities covered in 1923 alone. Lorillard was not to be outdone and in 1928 introduced “skycasting,” a technique by which a professional radio announcer would fly three thousand feet above Manhattan in a three-prop Fokker, urging (by massively amplified voice) the smoking of Old Gold cigarettes. According to a (preposterous) report in the New York Times, the voice was amplified “a hundred million times.” Skycasting did not last very long, but other kinds of gargantuan gimmicks would persist: Allan Brandt in his Cigarette Century recalls the huge smoke rings blown by the Camel Man on Times Square, torn down in 1966 only to be replaced (twenty-three years later) by an even larger neon Joe Camel, erected as part of the Winston-Salem company’s plan to “youthen” its image to compete with Marlboro.9 Nostalgia for such grandiose ads has been featured in many films, and the industry itself has tried to capitalize on nostalgia by reintroducing “classic” or “anniversary” brands with retro imagery.
Comic strips. As a vehicle for selling cigarettes, the earliest comic strip ads date from the 1930s, drawing flak from publishers worried by this flagrant move to target children. In 1935 newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst asked Reynolds to shift its cigarette ads from the comics pages to the adult sections of his papers, accusing the tobacco manufacturer of engaging in “a direct effort to teach the children to smoke cigarettes.” Reynolds by this time was spending 15 percent of its advertising budget on Sunday comics, reaching 23 million readers in 149 different newspapers. Hearst’s protest drew a polite but firm riposte from S. Clay Williams, Reynolds’s chairman of the board, who claimed that comic strip adverts were in no way designed to attract children; the comics (he said) were principally for adults.10
Billboard photolithography. Yet another invention of the tobacconists followed the 1970 federal ban on tobacco advertising on television. Manufacturers were desperate to find new ways to reach customers, to fill the void from the broadcast ban. Billboards had been a common advertising edifice prior to the Second World War, though television had caused something of a demotion in the 1950s and 1960s. Most people today will have forgotten that large-format billboards used to be painted by hand, according to a kind of mega paint-by-number process. This was tedious and time-consuming, and Philip Morris contracted with Kodak to develop a new process by which large-format images of, say, the Marlboro man on the open range could be printed on prefabricated sheets. Billboard painting soon thereafter became an obsolete trade, replaced by on-the-spot assembly and pasting of outsized photographic panels. American cigarette makers spent many millions of dollars on billboards prior to their disappearance as part of the 1998 Master Settlement Agreement, though advertising by such means is still quite common in many parts of the world.
Radio broadcasts. Tobacco sponsorship of radio began in the 1920s, with popular comedians such as Jack Benny hosting and hawking cigarettes. American Tobacco’s Lucky Strike Radio Hour entertained millions with its Lucky Strike Dance Orchestra; transcripts of shows from the late 1920s contain thousands of ads for Luckies, touted as “the healthy cigarette” and “a splendid alternative to fattening sweets.” Famous personalities were invoked to hammer home this “health in Luckies” theme: the actress Irene Bordoni smoked Luckies “to keep petite”; George Gershwin smoked them to keep “physically fit and mentally alert”; and Al Jolson smoked them to keep “peppy” but also because Luckies were “as sweet and soothing as the best ‘Mammy’ song ever written.”11 Toasting was boosted as a “mouth disinfectant” and “the most modern step in cigarette manufacture.” And we learn that visitors to the Lucky Strike factory in Reidsville, North Carolina, left “with a sense of sweetness, with a sense of cleanliness, with a sense of efficiency.” Transcripts of such shows reveal the announcers’ words being very carefully chosen: in one such set wherein Luckies get more than 1,800 plugs, the word throat crops up 98 times, but lungs are not mentioned even once.12 Such omissions are revealing; this is true even for the industry’s private internal speech. So among the thousands of named secret projects, there are projects for every sign of the zodiac save one; I’ll leave it to the reader to guess which (clue: it has to do with crabs).
Films and television. Cigarettes are among the very first products advertised on film. The oldest movie ads date from the 1890s; Thomas Edison’s charming ad for Admiral cigarettes is from 1897, for example, which may well be the world’s first “commercial” (it can now be seen on YouTube).13 Tobacco ads were common in movie theaters by the 1920s and on television by the 1940s. State-of-the-art animation was used in several of these, as in 1948, when American Tobacco aired its famous “dancing cigarettes,” using stop-motion photography techniques first developed by animators working for French tobacco manufacturers (George Pal’s famous “puppetoon” from 1932, shown in European theaters, featured dancing cigarettes). Ads of this sort were a big hit with the public, but they also showed how valuable television could be as an advertising medium. Cigarette makers were avid early sponsors of TV, from news and sports to sitcoms and dramas. Philip Morris sponsored I Love Lucy, the nation’s number one show for most of the 1950s, with extra pay going to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz for endorsing Philip Morris cigarettes in magazine ads. (I Love Lucy when it first aired in 1951 featured animated matchstick figures of Lucy and Ricky climbing down an oversized pack of Philip Morris cigarettes.) Even lesser shows like Public Defender, with heavy Marlboro plugging, captured 12 million viewers per week. Lorillard started sponsoring televised baseball in 1948, which is also about when Brown & Williamson started sponsoring televised college basketball. Careful studies were made of the reception of such broadcasts, and by 1948 Kool’s makers knew that 3.5 people per TV set were watching on any given evening, with a sponsored-brand recall (one day later) of about 68 percent.14 These were exceptionally good results, prompting a mad rush to the medium. And by the 1960s 45 percent of all television shows in the United States were being brought to you by cigarette manufacturers.15 Cigarettes remained the most widely advertised product on television until 1971, when ads were banned from the airwaves by an act of Congress.
Cigarettes owe more to film than is commonly realized. In a calculated effort begun more than a century ago, tobacco was brought to many remote parts of the world using movies as an enticement. British American Tobacco introduced cigarettes into China, for example, by showing films to village crowds and then offering cigarettes for sale or as free samples. Other parts of the world started smoking by similar means. The first “moving pictures” ever shown in Korea were screened in the final decade of the nineteenth century, when British cigarette agents rented a barracks to show a series of French film shorts for the Korean Tobacco Company. Free admission was granted to anyone with an empty box of the company’s cigarettes. British American continued this practice of using film to spur cigarette sales when it set up its first manufacturing plants in Korea in 1906. Here again, free admission was offered to anyone who could produce ten or twenty empty boxes of a BAT brand.16 Similar techniques are still being used in poorer parts of the world: in Pakistan, for example, Philip Morris subsidiary, Lakson, makers of Diplomat cigarettes, as recently as 2008 was running a “mobile cinema” luxury truck through remote parts of the Karakoram mountains, showing films while enticing young viewers to smoke.17
Hollywood’s romance with cigarettes began in the 1920s, when the industry landed on the idea of paying actors and studios for brand endorsements (“testimonials”). Studios benefited from the massive budgets allocated for such ads, which lined the pockets of literally hundreds of actors, not to mention singers, sportsmen, and at least ten U.S. senators. The tobacco archives contain contracts signed by some of the world’s most beloved stars of the silver screen—people like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, and Claudette Colbert. From the very first feature-length “talkie” of 1927 (The Jazz Singer) through 1951, at least 195 Hollywood stars endorsed cigarettes. Studios brokered cigarette contracts, and the tobacco companies “spent more to advertise Hollywood than Hollywood spent to advertise itself.”18 And that was just the beginning.
Product placement was banned by the studios as early as 1931, but there wasn’t yet much of a need for tricks of this sort, given how easily the actors themselves could be bought. Television also later became such a wildly successful vehicle for cigarettes that little thought was given to surreptitious branding. Much of that changed with the broadcast ban of 1970, however, and the rush to create new ways to advertise. Reynolds in its 1971 Management Plan recognized the value of “sponsored films,” noting that short subjects (travelogues, sports highlights, musicals) and full-length features showing company brands could be used as “subtle forms of advertising to the cinema audience.” The plan was to explore both short subject and feature-length film “plugs” as advertising opportunities, with test programs planned for 1971 that would include “opportunities in ethnic cinema.”19 Reynolds’s budgets from the 1970s already show thousands of dollars allocated for “movie plugs” or “brand plugs.”
The golden age of implants began in the 1980s, when tobacco companies started paying high-profile actors to smoke or flash a particular brand on screen. Sylvester Stallone in 1983, for example, agreed to smoke Brown & Williamson brands (such as Kool and Bel Air) in five of his forthcoming movies, for which he signed an agreement to receive $500,000.20 Stallone’s sweatshirted jogging up the steps of Philadelphia’s Museum of Art to prepare for his fights-against-all-odds has become a film icon—a life-size statue of Rocky erected for one of the scenes still stands nearby—but today’s viewers may find it odd to see the “Italian Stallion” or his co-stars smoking in such flicks.
In the real world of athletics, of course, smoking-while-in-training was already an anachronism long before Stallone started puffing for cash. In 1941 Gene Tunney, the former heavyweight champion, had attacked the use of athletes to sell cigarettes in an article for Reader’s Digest. Tunney was then in charge of physical training for the U.S. Navy, and to emphasize the strength of his convictions issued a challenge to world heavyweight champion Joe Louis: “If Joe Louis will start smoking, and promise to inhale a couple of packages of cigarettes every day for six months, I’ll engage to lick him in fifteen rounds!” Tunney added that Louis would surely refuse, since he too knew that “No boxer, no athlete in training smokes. He knows that whenever nerves, muscles, heart, and brain are called upon for a supreme effort, the tobacco user is the first to fold.”21 Tunney while preparing for a previous fight (with Jack Dempsey) had been offered and refused $15,000 to endorse a certain brand of cigarettes, citing Ty Cobb’s view that cigarette smoking “stupefies the brain, saps vitality, undermines health, and weakens moral fiber.”
(Prior to World War I Ty Cobb had allowed his name to be used on tobacco cards—as “King of the Smoking Tobacco World”—to market Sweet Caporal and Polar Bear cigarettes; the baseball star had also appeared in ads for American’s Tuxedo brand.22 His biographers note his fondness for briar pipes, so his doubts about cigarettes seem not to have extended to other forms of tobacco. In 1928 he appeared in ads for Old Gold cigarettes, and in 1954 he was paid again to endorse Luckies.)
Stallone’s agreement to smoke-for-pay in films is not unique. Dozens of Hollywood stars have taken such payments, including Paul Newman, Sean Connery, and Clint Eastwood. Brown & Williamson gave Newman a car worth $42,307 for placements in Harry and Son; Connery received $12,715 in jewelry for placements in Never Say Never Again; Eastwood got a car worth $22,000 for Killing Ground, and so forth. Product placement was common by the 1980s, when more than fifty different companies specialized in brokering such deals. Philip Morris paid $350,000 to have Lark cigarettes featured in the James Bond thriller Licence to Kill, for example, and Superman II had twenty-two distinct Marlboro implants, including a gigantic Marlboro billboard on the side of a truck that Christopher Reeve (as Superman) bursts through during the film’s final climax. Philip Morris paid 20,000 British pounds to get its famous red-roof chevron (code-named “the Material”) into the movie, which also featured a chain-smoking Lois Lane—a first for her since her debut in comics in the 1930s. In 1987 and 1988 alone Philip Morris provided free cigarettes and other props (including Marlboro signs) for fifty-six films. There was no shortage of opportunities, as the tobacco giant was being sent 150 scripts per year by this time—which amounted to about a third of all Hollywood films being made. Twentieth Century-Fox and several other studios had special merchandising divisions for handling product placement.23
Reading how smoking was incorporated into such scripts can be amusing. A 1989 Charlton Heston film titled Solar Crisis, for example, lists the following “Storyline” and “Potential Exposure”:
STORYLINE: “The sun has gone haywire and we have to go to the sun to fix it”. It’s a heck of a job, and Captain Steve Keslo leads the group of astronauts and scientists on a mission to save the world. With his father, Admiral Keslo, and his son Mike, Steve is motivated even more to save the lives of those below. One of the masterminds of the mission, Alex Noffe, makes great sacrifices for the success of the project, but will that be enough . . . ?”
POTENTIAL EXPOSURE: LUCKY STRIKES, PALL MALL and CARLTON CIGARETTES will be seen in the bar. Steve Keslo will smoke LUCKY STRIKES throughout the film.24
Fifty other films are described in this same memo, and for each an “exposure” opportunity is offered. For White Palace, starring Susan Sarandon, “Nora will smoke Pall Mall Cigarettes throughout the film.” For 3000, starring Julia Roberts, “Vivian’s friend, Kit (Laura San Giacomo) will smoke Carlton Cigarettes throughout the movie.” (This was released in 1990 as Pretty Woman.) For Harlem Nights, starring Eddie Murphy, “Lucky Strike & Pall Mall Period Packaging will be seen in the Night Club on the bar counter and being smoked by the patrons.”
Marketing and PR agents often specialized in arranging cinematic implants. In 1981, for example, the firm of Rogers & Cowan in Beverly Hills recapped its work for Reynolds over the past twelve months, during which cigarettes had been successfully placed in The Jazz Singer (the remake, with Neil Diamond), Backroads (Sally Field), Cannonball Run (Burt Reynolds), Pennies from Heaven (with Steve Martin), Blowout (John Travolta), Rich and Famous (Candice Bergen and Jacqueline Bisset) and “many, many others.” The company also scripted cigarette-friendly spots for television—on Good Morning America, for example, where Paul Newman was shown practicing lighting two cigarettes at once for his remake of Now Voyager. Rogers & Cowan also supplied cigarettes to TV talk show “green rooms” (where guests wait when not on stage), worked with fashion photographers to make sure models smoked, distributed photos of smoking celebrities, and placed a story about Mikhail Baryshnikov smoking four packs a day as part of his ballet routine.25
The use of smoke in film is often defended on grounds of historical realism, but more often than not we are talking about a falsification of history. Stanton Glantz and his colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have shown that Hollywood actors are more likely to smoke on film than their counterparts in real life.26 And no society has ever smoked as much as we find in, say, Randal Kleiser’s Grease or The Edge of Love with Keira Knightly and her friends. Emilio Estevez’s 2006 Bobby is a particularly egregious affront, given that Robert F. Kennedy was one of only a handful of U.S. senators brave enough to stand up to the tobacco cartel. As if to mock the man, this award-winning dramatization of RFK’s assassination features Demi Moore awkwardly brandishing a pack of Marlboros center-screen for a full thirty seconds. Kennedy would have been horrified, albeit perhaps unsurprised given his recognition of the industry’s perfidy. As a champion of the move to ban tobacco ads on TV, he was forceful on this point: “The industry we seek to negate is powerful and resourceful. Each new effort to regulate will bring new ways to evade. Still, we must be equal to the task. For the stakes involved are nothing less than the lives and health of millions all over the world.”27
Realism is actually a poor excuse for depicting smoking in movies. In the 1930s, when smoking was all the rage on the silver screen, smoking was nowhere near as popular as it would later become. Americans smoked only 134 billion cigarettes in 1935, compared with 630 billion in 1980. Smoking was not so common in the films of 1980, even though that was close to the peak year for total U.S. consumption. And film implants from that point on increased, even as smoking rates declined. The big push for implants—and payoffs—came in the late 1980s and 1990s, when film was turned into one of the industry’s favorite advertising vehicles. And as recently as 2005 one in six box office leaders in the United States featured specific cigarette brands. Children’s movies have been targeted, with implants appearing in films such as Bad News Bears, The Muppet Movie, and Men in Black. Old movies also get recirculated, extending the life of the ad as no other medium can. Many film classics have become immortal cigarette ads. Epidemiologists have suggested that half of all new smokers start as a result of exposure to smoking in Hollywood films.28 Disney, Warner Brothers, and Universal have all recently announced policies to limit or discontinue such displays, but most of the other studios—Sony, Fox, and others—continue to portray smoking as an attractive and ordinary part of life.29 And as for realism: how realistic was it when Avatar’s exobiologist (played by Sigourney Weaver), working in a closed oxygen environment on an alien planet in the year 2154, has as her very first line, “Who’s got my goddamn cigarette?” Moviemakers need to appreciate—and challenge—the advice Philip Morris got in 1989 from its marketing experts, who reported that “most of the strong, positive images for cigarettes and smoking are created and perpetuated by cinema and television.”30
One curious aspect of early magazine and newspaper ads is how often doctors were used to sell cigarettes. (Robert and Laurie Jackler and I have created a website with some of the most astonishing images—search “Not a Cough in a Carload.”) Cigarettes in the nineteenth century had been touted as a cure-all—vintage “asthma cigarettes” can occasionally be found for sale on eBay—and regular cigarettes were sometimes smoked to treat lung ailments of one sort or another. Parents are even known to have forced their children to smoke to treat a lung infection. But it was not really until the 1930s that medical endorsements became big business. Liggett & Myers began placing cigarette ads in medical journals in 1933; the company that year paid the New York State Journal of Medicine to hawk its Chesterfield brand (“pure as the water you drink . . . and practically untouched by human hands”), and dozens of medical journals began running tobacco ads soon thereafter.
The American Tobacco Company paved part of this way by using doctors to celebrate its “secret toasting” process. Tobacco had long been thought to have certain “disinfecting powers”—just as fire cleaned medical instruments—and the hope was to associate “toasting” with health protection. As hype, toasting was buoyed by contemporary obsessions with germs, with the idea being that heat applied during the curing process might kill microbes lurking in the leaf. Some people smoked as a treatment for colds, and some at least seem to have imagined that fumigation might effect a kind of cauterization of the lungs. Heat sanitized tobacco (and your lungs) just as cooking (or smoking) made meats safe. Marketers capitalized on such fantasies, with ads from the 1920s claiming that “20,679 physicians” found Luckies “less irritating to the throat” or that Luckies could help smokers keep “a slender figure,” and so forth. Another series compared the discovery of toasting to Columbus’s discovery of America, Fulton’s invention of steam navigation, Franklin’s discovery of electricity, and a dozen-odd other heroic exploits—all likened to the miracle of Lucky Strikes.31
The Reynolds company was angered by this and launched a counterattack, reminding smokers that while it was “fun to be fooled” (by silly claims for toasting) it was “better to know.” The William Esty Advertising Agency unrolled its “magic campaign” for Camels in 1933, exposing the secrets of the conjurer’s art (disappearing elephants, women sawed in half, etc.) to boost the Reynolds brand over Lucky Strikes. Reynolds also published a book on how to perform magic tricks, featuring tricks with cigarettes.32 The company’s “healthy nerves” campaign (“Camels never jangle your nerves!”) followed shortly thereafter, with ads promising that Camels would “give you a lift” or never “get your wind.”33 Testimonials from athletes appear in countless ads from this era, with substantial payments going to baseball, golf, and football stars along with heroes from perhaps a dozen other sports. All for a price: baseball fans may recall Babe Ruth’s tearful good-bye from Yankee Stadium, looking emaciated and with a harsh, raspy voice from the throat cancer that would soon take his life.
Medico-tobacco hype culminated in R. J. Reynolds’s “More Doctors Smoke Camels” campaign, another William Esty brainchild featuring idealized physicians reassuring smokers they would experience “not one single case of throat irritation” so long as they kept to Reynolds’s flagship brand. Surveys were said to have generated these ridiculous statistics. The method was textbook bias: free cigarettes were handed out at medical conventions, following which doctors would be stopped and asked, “What brand do you smoke, Doctor?” Since many were carrying their newly acquired Camels, the admen used this to claim that Camels were preferred by medical men. Similar campaigns were run in Europe: 1,004 doctors were said to have found Kensitas cigarettes less irritating, for example, in consequence of the use of ultraviolet rays in manufacturing.
Ads in the 1930s and 1940s often featured endorsements by nurses or medical students, and the American Tobacco Company had a string of ads in which “Scientific Tests” touted Lucky Strikes as “milder than any other brand.” Smokers were also invited to conduct their own “taste tests,” which Martha Gardner and Allan Brandt have identified as a means by which manufacturers undermined the growing medical evidence of hazards.34 Cigarette makers at this point were still competing with one another in the realm of health—so when American Tobacco claimed that “toasting” made its cigarettes less irritating, Reynolds countered that “over-cooking” would degrade the natural taste of tobacco. Mentholated cigarettes such as Kool, introduced in 1933, were supposed to protect you from colds, and Philip Morris advertised in medical journals throughout the United States that “3 out of every 4 cases” of smoker’s cough disappeared after smoking the Philip Morris brand.35
At the height of all this medical hoopla in the 1940s and early 1950s, cigarette makers often set up booths at medical meetings to bolster the fortunes of one brand or another. Free cigarettes were handed out,36 and in at least one instance giant photo-murals showed Reynolds scientists dutifully at work in the lab. Explicit medical endorsements disappeared in the mid-1950s with the nailing down of the cancer consensus (see below), but it is important to realize that tobacco advertising continued, surprisingly late, in many state and local medical journals. Journals of state medical associations in Virginia, Massachusetts, Nebraska, Arizona, and more than two dozen other states carried cigarette ads into the mid-1960s. As late as 1969 ads for Tareytons were still being published in the Delaware Medical Journal, the Journal of the Louisiana State Medical Society, the Journal of the Mississippi State Medical Association, and the Virginia Medical Monthly.37
Oddly enough, the tobacco industry has maintained for decades that advertising causes no one to smoke (or to start smoking); ads are just supposed to make people who already smoke switch from one brand to another. Scholars investigating this question, however, have shown that advertising causes not just switching but initiation, and that young people tend to smoke brands that are most aggressively advertised. The industry admits as much in memos intended purely for internal use. It also makes sense, given that cigarette makers advertise even when competition from other brands is absent (in countries where the production and sale of tobacco are monopolized by the state, for example). The idea that advertising won’t cause anyone to try smoking is a bizarre violation of common sense—and has drawn ridicule even from advertisers who have worked with the industry. Here is the view of Emerson Foote, a former CEO of McCann-Erickson, a global advertising agency with millions of dollars in tobacco accounts:
The cigarette industry has been artfully maintaining that cigarette advertising has nothing to do with total sales. This is complete and utter nonsense. The industry knows it is nonsense. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products.38
The industry privately admits that advertising for other products—including nicotine patches—causes an increase in demand, so again: why should this be any different for cigarettes? Robert K. Heimann, executive vice president of American Tobacco, put the matter nicely in a 1966 talk to his sales force; the purpose of advertising was “simple: to get more triers.”39
The fact is that tobacco marketeers have worked very hard to find out what kinds of ads work best, spending enormous sums on marketing psychology, focus groups, and every imaginable state-of-the art technique for tracking desire and persuading to buy. Focus groups are asked questions like, “What kind of car would a Marlboro smoker drive?” or “If Newport were a woman, what kind of woman would that be?” A 1997 study comparing brand imagery of Marlboro, Marlboro Lights, and Newports found that smokers of Marlboro Reds “have often overcome difficulties” and remain “slightly angry, resentful, bitter, judgmental,” with “feminist leanings.” Smokers of Marlboro Lights, by contrast, were more likely to “enjoy the social scene, find a significant other, marry, own a beautiful home, [and] have healthy, happy children.” Smokers of Reds, Lights, or Newports were distinguished by their preferred cars, clothing, and music; favorite actresses and role models; and political attitudes—even preferences in the realm of tattoo types and piercings. This same study looked at how smokers of one kind of cigarette regarded smokers of other brands: so whereas urban young adult female Newport smokers regarded smokers of Marlboro Lights as “white girls who have to look perfect all the time,” smokers of Marlboro Lights regarded Newport smokers as “slutty girls” who “think they’re tough” but are really “immature” and “ignorant.”40
Cigarette marketers have also quantified the number of advertising images to which people are exposed. In 1954, for example, Philip Morris revealed that Americans had been exposed to 3.2 billion cigarette “messages” over the past year. I Love Lucy alone—a show owned by Philip Morris at one point—reached an audience of 41 million people per week.41 Philip Morris was still only a minor player in the cigarette business, which means that if their advertising budget was typical there must have been over 37 billion “messages” broadcast by the industry in that one year. The industry later measured advertising impact in terms of “Commercial Minute Impressions,” defined as one person viewing one minute of advertising. In January of 1961, for example, Americans watched a total of 2,567,085,000 minutes of cigarette advertising on television.42 That’s about 30 billion person-minutes of cigarette ads per annum—or about fifty hours per person. And that was only for TV. Radio accounted for an additional chunk, as did advertising via billboards, newspapers, point-of-sale posters, and various other media. Millions of Americans got catchy cigarette jingles stuck in their heads before 1970, when the airwaves were finally cleared of such rubbish. Most Americans from my generation have creases in our brains where ditties like “Winston tastes good like a [clap clap] cigarette should!” are indelibly seared. Ask your parents (or grandparents).
Tobacco advertising also “works” more indirectly, however, to create allies in the form of editors and producers who want to maintain the tobacco money pipeline. Advertising dollars for many years were a major source of income for newspapers, radio, television, and magazines—and for athletes, artists, musicians, and others hooked on cigarette sponsorship. Commentary to this effect can often be found in the industry’s archives, as when Philip Morris cautioned that loss of advertising could mean a loss of the industry’s “political clout”: “If you take away advertising and sponsorship, you lose most, if not all, of your media and political allies.”43
One interesting aspect of magazine advertising is the portrayal of tobacco as an icon around which opposites could unite. Tobacco ads from the 1930s and 1940s depicted cigarettes or cigars as uniting North and South, Lee and Grant, Yankees and Red Sox, Democrats and Republicans, and rivals in other realms. “Brothers under the cellophane,” is how Bob Hope and Bing Crosby were cast in Chesterfield ads: rivals in golf and baseball but united in their chosen brand of smoke. “Unity” and “accommodation” were also themes in the industry’s global “Courtesy of Choice” campaign of the 1990s and 2000s, crafted to secure rights for smokers to the air of restaurants, bars, and cafés. Spearheaded by Philip Morris, and using the International Hotel Association as a front, this ambitious campaign popularized a yin-yang symbol to express this fantasy of smokers and nonsmokers eating, working, and puffing away together in blissful harmony. Philip Morris ran a similar “Accommodation Program” in the United States, establishing front groups in the hospitality industry to combat any effort to prohibit smoking in restaurants or public spaces. The yin-yang design was supposed to convey this theme of uniting opposites, basically: Can’t we all just be friends and get along, smokers and nonsmokers alike? Presumably all sharing each others’ exhaled and sidestream particulates.44
Cigarette marketing budgets grew dramatically in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, though some kinds of advertising came at little or no cost to the companies. One of the less obvious techniques involved marketing to children via candy cigarettes. We can’t yet tell whether the industry ever directly sponsored such products, but we do know that for many years the companies turned a blind eye to brand infringements of this sort, as confectioners churned out candy sticks with names like “Winston,” “L&M,” “Lucky Strike,” “Chesterfield,” and “Philip Morris.” Cigarette manufacturers claim never to have encouraged such practices, but they clearly welcomed the infringement. Addison Yeaman, a top lawyer at Brown & Williamson, in 1946 wrote to one candy manufacturer, “We have never raised any objection to the use of our labels feeling, for your more or less private information, that it is not too bad an advertisement.” Philip Morris coordinated the sale of candy cigarettes with its Johnny (Roventini) Jr. Operation, the goal of which was to “create Philip Morris in the minds of our future smokers.”45
Candy cigarettes first appeared in the nineteenth century, when the Hershey Corporation in Pennsylvania began marketing a Hershey’s brand chocolate cigarette for children. Brand infringements had begun by the 1920s and were not at first welcomed by the industry. In 1928 the American Tobacco Company filed suit to prohibit the sale of a candy cigarette known as “Lucky Smokes,” and Lorillard one year later sued a candy manufacturer for using its Old Gold name and font.46 By the late 1930s, however, the more common attitude had turned to a quieter kind of accommodation. American Tobacco had offended candy makers in the late 1920s with its exhortation to “Reach for a Lucky Instead of a Sweet,” and when that campaign was curtailed (in 1930, when the last four words were jettisoned) the path was smoothed for friendlier collaborations. Joint candy and tobacco labor unions were established, along with combined tobacco and confectionery journals. And smoking itself eventually came to be more like a candified luxury treat, with fruity-sweet flavorings added to appeal to starters and learners.
By the 1940s and 1950s candy simulations were available for most leading brands—packaged to look like near-perfect copies of the original article. Candy cigarettes came to be seen as gateways to the smoking habit, a kind of training in gestures cigarette makers were quite willing to tolerate. Addison Yeaman at Brown & Williamson had regarded chocolates imitating the company’s Raleigh brand as “not too bad an advertisement”; he elaborated on this view every now and again, commenting on his company’s belief that “the simulation of one of our trade marked cigarette package labels does not constitute any threat to our trade mark rights” so long as there was no “cheapening” of its design. The company had therefore “not made any objection to candy manufacturers using copies of our labels for their products.”47
Yeaman’s comments are significant, given his subsequent denial of having ever tolerated such infringements. In 1967 the administrator of the industry’s Cigarette Advertising Code wrote to ask if his company had ever had anything to do with the many kinds of bubble gum and candy packaged to look like cigarettes. The administrator observed that while the code did not explicitly cover candy cigarettes, “its spirit is certainly offended by them.” Yeaman responded that his company did not manufacture or sell candy cigarettes and that “certainly for the length of my recollection as General Counsel to Brown & Williamson, we have never authorized nor consented to the use of our marks by candy manufacturers.”48 Yeaman must have been playing word games, however, since he clearly had endorsed this practice two decades earlier. Yeaman at the time (1940s) had not yet risen to the rank of general counsel, which may have allowed him this rather disingenuous and misleading denial.
The fact is that in the 1940s and 1950s at least, Brown & Williamson had regarded infringements of this sort as fine, so long as the quality of the candy was up to par and the likeness of the package sufficiently close to the company’s real cigarettes. Yeaman had written to many candy manufacturers to express his desire for quality control and an exact pack-art likeness; he had also implemented a policy whereby the granting of permission to use the company’s trademarked brands was made contingent on the production of quality candy and packaging—to ensure that a particular brand be “faithfully reproduced so as to do justice to it.” Brown & Williamson was not alone in this respect: Lorillard also allowed candy brand imitations in cases where “the candy and the reproduction of our labels and trade-marks are of high quality.” We also have examples in which if a candy company’s labels or packages deviated sufficiently from those of the actual cigarette, Brown & Williamson would demand that the candies be made to more closely resemble the tobacco originals. And to facilitate compliance, Yeaman often included samples of the relevant cigarette packaging labels in his letters granting permission.49
Philip Morris employees also recognized the value of using candy cigarettes to attract youthful sympathies. Gus Wayne, one of four “Johnny Juniors” used when Roventini wasn’t available, made this clear in a 1953 proposal to his handlers:
In my travels I’ve noticed that “Johnny” is more readily recoginized [sic] by the children than the adults. Children, being very impressionable, remember things they see and hear, long after they’ve occurred. Here now, I further feel, based on my observations, that the Philip Morris trade mark “Johnny” has fallen into the same category as Hop-a-long Cassidy, Howdy-Doody, etc.
Due to these facts, I’ve found it necessary to, when I’m making appearance in supermarkets, drug stores, etc., to buy and hand out to the children bars of candy, chocolates, lolly pops etc.
Now then, here’s my idea: we could, if you feel it has merit, have chocolate cigarettes made up in Philip Morris wrappers, and in the process of handing guest packages out to the adults, we could give the children a replica of our Philip Morris guest package containing chocolate cigarettes. I feel that the gesture, in conjunction with “Johnny” personally handing them to the children will remain in their minds for years to come.50
Candy cigarettes continued to be made throughout the 1960s, albeit increasingly with names slightly skewed from those of genuine cigarettes: Viceray instead of Viceroy, Marlbro instead of Marlboro, Winstun instead of Winston, Cool instead of Kool, and so forth. Hundreds of candy “brands” of this sort were sold, with names like Lucky Stripes, Lucky Stride, Lucky Spike or Bucky Strike, or Camales, Camols, Cammels, Camals, Kamel, Kamols, Kemel, Pamel, and so on. And if cigarette makers relished this cost-free advertising, candy makers for their part were happy to profit from the tie-in.51 Candy makers capitalized on the desires of kids to be like adults, sometimes explicitly. The American Nut and Chocolate Company of Boston, for example, sold “Harvard Brand” candy cigarettes in twenty-four-pack cartons, with cover art featuring a cheerful young boy holding a (smoldering?) candy cigarette and trying to be “Just Like Daddy!” (see Figures 7 and 8).
Concerns also began to grow, however, that candy cigarettes might be creating bad PR for tobacco makers. A 1963 letter published in Britain’s Medical Officer complained about the “very early age at which smoking is being presented as an attractive habit,” and some tobacco manufacturers started publicly declaring their opposition to candy brand infringements. Lorillard in 1969 put World Candies on notice that it would not tolerate the “counterfeiting” of its True brand; R. J. Reynolds threatened to sue the same company in 1980; and other tobacco manufacturers sought to distance themselves from candy imitations.52 Some of these protests were just for show, however. Lorillard, for example—just as it was putting World Candies on notice—pondered and then quietly endorsed the use of its Kent brand imagery in candy cigarettes made in Holland and Italy. The company decided that while no formal permission would be granted, back channels would be used to indicate the company’s approval of such infringements: “We would also like to be included in the selection [of cigarette brands chosen for candy modeling], without giving our written approval but letting it be known to the people involved that we would not object if they did.”53
Tobacco companies continued to view candy cigarette manufacturers as “friends,” partly by virtue of sharing a common enemy. In 1983 the chief of New York State’s Tobacco Action Network (TAN)—an industry group—wrote to his fellow TAN activists “to call your attention to several other issues which could also rear their ugly heads,” including a proposed ban on sampling, a bill requiring disclosure of cigarette ingredients, and a bill to prohibit the sale of candy cigarettes. Lobbying efforts were organized to stop such bills: in 1971, for example, the New York State Association of Tobacco and Candy Distributors mounted a campaign to defeat a law that would have banned all candies in the form of pipes, cigars, or cigarettes. The association warned that “even a Tootsie Roll” might fall under the law (for appearing in the shape of a cigarette) and circulated to legislators an expert report from a psychologist denying any causal link between candy cigarettes and youth smoking. The Association managed to turn a 134-to-14 majority for the ban into a slight minority, and the bill was defeated. The organizer had earlier been active in the tobacco industry’s efforts to block tobacco taxes in New York, through a group calling itself the Committee Against Unjust Cigarette Taxes.54
Candy distributors have played a little-appreciated role in the industry’s lobbying and propaganda efforts, including its myriad denialist campaigns. California’s Association of Tobacco and Candy Distributors, for example, in the late 1970s distributed leaflets with titles like “Is Tobacco Smoke a Health Hazard to Nonsmokers?” and “Today’s Anti-Smoking Prohibitionists Follow Path Blazed by Carry Nation.” Candy wholesalers have often been called upon to help defeat tobacco control legislation. In 1985, for example, Minnesota’s Senate Finance Committee approved an amendment banning the sale of candy cigarettes, but the measure failed in the state senate, following lobbying by the state’s Tobacco and Candy Distributors Association and other industry groups. As late as 1995 Philip Morris was still including World Candies and NECCO, two leading manufacturers of candy cigarettes, on its list of “Tobacco-Related Web Addresses.” That list included more than a hundred friends of the industry—and no opponents.55
When tobacco companies finally began taking stronger steps to discourage candy cigarettes—responding to public pressure—they usually allowed candy makers to continue using such labels until inventories were exhausted. In 1985, for example, Brown & Williamson’s Kendrick Wells wrote to the president of World Candies, Samuel Cohen, asking him to discontinue the use of the Barclay name with candy cigarettes. The letter stated that the “American public has formed a firm consensus that the marketing of candy cigarettes bearing real cigarette brand names could stimulate children’s interest in real cigarettes and, therefore, is improper.” The language here is carefully crafted: the company doesn’t admit that candy cigarettes contribute to youth smoking but only that “the American public” believed this to be true. Wells later thanked Cohen for agreeing to discontinue the label, but he also granted him permission to use up whatever inventories he might have on hand.56 So despite acknowledging the public’s sense of a danger of stimulating children’s interest in smoking, Brown & Williamson remained unconcerned about the existence of unsold candy cigarettes. The company could have purchased existing stocks from warehouses and retailers, for example, but no such steps were ever taken.
Similar apathy is apparent in correspondence from 1990, when the Stark Candy Co. of Pewaukee, Wisconsin, wrote to Brown & Williamson regarding a letter the tobacco manufacturer had sent concerning Viceroy brand candy cigarettes. Stark Candy noted that it had changed the name of its Viceroy candy cigarettes to “VICERAY Candy Cigarettes” and that the artwork had been changed “to have our candy cigarette box be as dissimilar to your trademark item as possible.” But the company also admitted to having a year’s supply of packaging in the older style and announced that it would use these to “run out the packaging that we own.”57 As with the Barclays, Brown & Williamson agreed to allow Stark to continue using its brand name until its supplies ran out—with no offer to compensate the company for destruction of the labels. The financial cost of such a solution would have been trivial, but it would have diminished Brown & Williamson’s brand contact with children.
Marketing to children has drawn a lot of heat for the industry, but we should also recall that intensive targeting of teens is actually fairly recent. The Joe Camel campaign launched in 1987 is notorious, and the 1970s are full of calls for youth marketing, but young teen targeting is not really a strong priority prior to this time. There are, however, some exceptions. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, R. J. Reynolds targeted elite preparatory schools in the United States, hoping to capture this pre-college market. One breathless missive sent to all sales division managers in 1927 announced, “School days are here. And that means BIG TOBACCO BUSINESS for somebody. Let’s get it.—and start after it RIGHT NOW.” Ads were placed in college newspapers, posters were posted on campus, and free samples were handed out. George Seldes in 1947 caught wind of this trend and cautioned that with the market for men nearly saturated, the only direction for expansion was to women and children. That was also the view of “most cigaret experts,” according to the advertising weekly Tide.58
The big push to target teens doesn’t really come until the 1970s, as a result of increased competition for the crucial—and relatively new—middle teen market. American smokers in the 1950s had tended to start in their late teens, whereas by the end of the 1960s they were starting in their mid- to early teens. Cigarette makers recognized this and actively competed to hook into this market—and not just in the United States. Philip Morris included teenagers in its marketing plans for Japan, for example, and in Argentina, British American Tobacco collaborated with Nobleza-Piccardo to position Kent cigarettes as the “International Smoker Reassurance brand” for males and females aged fifteen to nineteen.59
Tobacco manufacturers have used many different expressions to characterize this young smoker segment. Starters, learners, and first or beginning smokers are terms we commonly find in the archives, along with rookie smokers, new smokers, presmokers, new starters, new triers, trend-setters, the young adult franchise, and tomorrow’s cigarette business. A more general term used by the marketing department at Reynolds was replacement smokers, envisioned as needed to offset the “attrition” coming at the terminal end of a lifetime of smoking. Reynolds documents from the 1970s talk about the young adult market aged 14–21 and the starter smoker segment; Brown & Williamson’s “Viceroy strategy” targeted young starters for whom cigarettes—along with beer, first-time sex, and courtship—served as “the initiation into the adult world.” The companies talk about entry level users and the value of marketing to Generation Y (13–19), and so forth. A 1970 Roper report to Philip Morris identified the primary market for Marlboros as teenagers and suggested a plan to measure the smoking habits of soldiers and college students but also “young people in the 14 to 17 age group.” Philip Morris researchers in 1981 identified “today’s teenager” as “tomorrow’s potential regular customer,” noting also that Marlboro was as successful as it was partly because it had become “the brand of choice among teenagers who then stuck with it as they grew older.” Children in the 1970s were explicitly regarded as “prospective smokers” in Philip Morris’s Nicotine Psychopharmacology Program, which produced internal research reports with titles like “Aggressive Monkeys” and “Hyperkinetic Child as a Prospective Smoker.”60
Children have also been targeted in other parts of the world. Philip Morris’s marketing plan for Holland in 1982 included “starting and current smokers” as part of its “prime target group,” and the same company sponsored Chinese professional soccer because of its appeal “among YAMS” (young adult male smokers). “Starters” were also important in Philip Morris’s 1992–94 “Three Year Plan” for Europe. (“Marlboro’s leadership in the foreign full flavor segment is reflected in continued gains in its share among starters and among young adult smokers.”) Canadian manufacturers targeted youngsters: Imperial Tobacco in 1979, for example, constructed a “media plan” to advertise du Maurier and Player’s cigarettes, both of which had high “starter numbers,” meaning they were attractive to beginning smokers. The plan distinguished four different “target groups” by age: 12 to 17, 18 to 24, 25 to 34, and the geezer crowd at 35 and older. Each of these groups was assigned a different numerical “weight,” according to its importance for the advertising campaign. In the plan for Player’s, for example, the youngest group (12- to 17-year-olds) was given a weight of 1.0, whereas the group aged 25 to 34 was given a weight of .7, and the 35-and-over crowd was ignored altogether (with a weighting of 0.0). Teenagers were clearly a prime target for Imperial, a priority also expressed in the expectation that while most new users would be “switchers,” some nontrivial percentage would be “starters”—people who had never before smoked.61
Marketing to what Roper called “the very young” presented certain challenges, however, given that this was “the most fickle group of customers.” Young smokers are not so fixed in their brand loyalty, which is one reason pitching to this group has been so earnest. Marlboro in the late 1960s was becoming the nation’s leading cigarette (according to Roper Research) “almost solely because of its great popularity among young people”; even so, there was always the danger that “should another brand catch the attention of young smokers and become the ‘in’ brand, Marlboro could face a severe problem.”62
That of course was the hope of brand managers at every other company. High school students became one of the most highly prized targets, which is why a 1978 Lorillard memo (to the company’s president) identified high schoolers as “the base of our business”: “The success of NEWPORT has been fantastic during the past few years. Our profile taken locally shows this brand being purchased by black people (all ages), young adults (usually college age), but the base of our business is the high school student.”63 Newport by this time accounted for nearly a third of Lorillard’s total cigarette sales, and though the brand was still presumed to have “plenty of room to grow,” there was also the danger that some of these younger smokers might start quitting. In strategy planning documents developed for its five-year plan from 1981, the company commented on the threat posed to the company if this “under 18” crowd (and African Americans) were ever to quit the habit: “The easiest is to keep riding with Newport. However, I think we must continually keep in mind that Newport is being heavily supported by blacks and the under 18 smokers. We are on somewhat thin ice should either of these two groups decide to shift their smoking habits.”64
The danger (“thin ice”) was not that high schoolers were smoking Lorillard brands; the danger was that they might stop. Capturing kids was key given the high brand loyalty in this business—which is also why Claude E. Teague, Reynolds’s powerful assistant director of research, recommended a search through high school American history textbooks to find brand names or images that would resonate with rookie smokers.65
Reynolds was particularly eager to market to youngsters, with the goal of regaining some of the market share lost to Marlboro. A 1973 memo by Claude Teague noted, “Realistically, if our Company is to survive and prosper, over the long term, we must get our share of the youth market.” Cigarettes were to be deliberately designed with this young smoker in mind—by making them long and (therefore) easy to handle and to light, for example. A 1975 Reynolds update on its “Meet the Turk” campaign, stamped “Secret,” concluded that “To ensure increased and longer-term growth for Camel Filter, the brand must increase its share penetration among the 14–24 age group which have a new set of more liberal values and which represent tomorrow’s cigarette business.” Reynolds sponsored supercross (off-road motorcycle racing) because its 575,000 fans constituted “perfect Camel demographics”: four out of five were males aged sixteen to thirty-four, most were beer drinkers, and more than a third were smokers. Market profilers often tried to estimate how a particular brand would appeal to this crucial teenage market; the companies knew that most new smokers were now starting in their mid- or early teens and that brands chosen early on were likely to have staying power. This was also true in Europe: in Sweden in the 1990s, for example, a series of interviews conducted for Philip Morris found that “almost all the people interviewed started smoking when they were still at school; between the ages of 14 and 16.”66
Marketing to kids has sometimes been more indirect, as when cigarettes are sold in vending machines to which children often have access. Or even via special designs in packaging. Sale of singles (“loosies”) has been banned in many parts of the world for precisely this reason—to limit youth access. Sale of cigarettes in packets of two or four has been halted for similar reasons, though the industry has used some interesting tricks to get around such laws. In the Philippines, when the government banned the sale of cigarettes in anything smaller than a twenty-pack, Philip Morris responded by producing cigarettes in a folding, tear-off, accordion-like package consisting of four conjoined mini-packs housing five cigarettes each and the whole tied into a folded bundle. The tied-up bundle follows the letter of the law since it contains twenty cigarettes, but the mini-packs are easily detached and sold separately, violating the spirit of the law (see Figure 9).
The industry has always denied marketing to children and has long tried to appear not to condone such sales. The paper trail reveals a more cynical opportunism, however. A 1970 document in Lorillard’s files talks about the value of packaging that would be “attractive to kids (young adults)”; the Kicks brand planned by the company was to be sold in packages of ten (vs. the standard twenty) to be more affordable to teens. This same memo cautions that the company should not be “obvious” in its efforts to market to youngsters, lest it arouse suspicions; the point was “to attract the youthful eye . . . not the ever-watchful eye of the Federal Government.” We can also ask, though: if the companies didn’t want to market to youth, why did they advertise in comics? Why did they fantasize about incorporating “video game imagery into pack design,” using motifs of Pac-man and Space Invaders and the like to capitalize on “the video game craze”?67
I’ve mentioned my own personal experience of being told—in high school—that kids weren’t supposed to smoke; smoking was an “adult choice” like skydiving or drinking or having sex or riding a motorcycle, things that, of course, no teenager would ever want. The industry’s effort to define smoking as an “adult” indulgence has this convenient backdraft: if it is only for adults, kids are pretty sure to want it. Brown & Williamson in 1975 talked privately about smoking as an “illicit pleasure” and “the entrance ticket” to the halls of adult society; “starters” were therefore to be reached by presenting cigarettes as “one of a few initiations into the adult world”:
In the young smoker’s mind a cigarette falls into the same category with wine, beer, shaving, wearing a bra (or purposely not wearing one), declaration of independence and striving for self-identity. For the young starter, a cigarette is associated with introduction to sex life, with courtship, with smoking “pot” and keeping late studying hours. For the young smoker, the cigarette is a clean/socially acceptable (to a degree at least), communication symbol of maturity, sophistication and adulthood. The cigarette is the entrance ticket to the hall of the adult society.
For anyone wanting to sell cigarettes to “young starters,” the imperatives were clear. Sellers would have to convey the allure of maturity, the veneer of rebellion, and the illusion that new smokers know what they are doing:
• Present the cigarette as one of a few initiations into the adult world.
• Present the cigarette as a part of the illicit pleasure category of products and activities.
• Don’t force your brand on the starters. They don’t take orders. They are not yet as tame as the “liberated” adult society. Suggest a cigarette.
• Consider a sampling technique to allow the young starters to actually try your brand. (They have very little ability to really compare, but they would like to see themselves as having this ability.)68
And so forth.
The Tobacco Institute’s public face was somewhat more subtle, claiming, “We don’t think our kids should smoke. . . . As with many of life’s pleasures, smoking, drinking and driving a car require a knowledge of oneself and a sense of moderation that come only with age.” Most of the programs organized by the industry to “discourage” youth smoking have been ineffective, however, or worse. Some look more like de facto ads for smoking. In fall 2000, for example, Philip Morris sent 13 million schoolbook covers to high schools throughout the United States—with plans for another 13 million—instructing youngsters, “Think. Don’t Smoke.” The colorful image featured a snowboarder soaring over snow-topped mountains (tobacco leaves?) with “Don’t Wipe Out” emblazoned over a loner standing apart from the crowd. School board authorities quickly realized this was not much of an anti-tobacco ad, no more than Lorillard’s 2002 “Tobacco is whacko if you’re a teen” or Reynolds’s “Support the Law.” Scholars have shown that the industry’s professed efforts to discourage teen smoking have little or no effect and may even encourage the kinds of rebellion that stimulate experimentation. California schools refused the book covers, and even the industry-friendly Advertising Age observed that the Philip Morris ad looked “alarmingly like a colorful pack of cigarettes.”69 (See Figures 10 and 12.)
Studies have shown that ads of this sort make kids less likely to regard cigarette companies as duplicitous, and less likely to want them to go out of business. This isn’t hard to understand, once you see how feeble most such ads are. Early in the new millennium, for example, Philip Morris produced a series of brochures titled “Raising Kids Who Don’t Smoke.” Nominally intended for parents, the advice in these brochures was basically: “talk to your kids about smoking.” The series was produced with the help of an advisory board headed by Lawrence Kutner of Harvard Medical School, and neither he nor the other members of the board seems to have thought it worth mentioning that parents who smoke should set an example by trying to quit. Parents are advised, “Encourage your child to talk with her doctor,” “Talk with a guidance counselor” about cessation, and “Call up local chapters of national organizations like the American Lung Association” for further advice. One brochure reassures the worried (smoking) parent: “You may feel guilty. You may think that because your child has told you again and again not to smoke, he would never try it. Or you might feel like a hypocrite telling him not to smoke when it’s something he knows you do. . . . But you’re still the parent. You set the rules.”70
Philip Morris is basically advising parents to keep on smoking, even if they feel like hypocrites for asking their kids not to. The parent is not supposed to set an example but rather just to “set the rules.” It might be hard to imagine a better recipe for rebellion—and noncompliance—which may well be one of the goals of such ads. “Acceptable rebellion” is one way the industry defines youth smoking.71 The industry wants us to think they don’t want kids to smoke, when the reality is that young people are crucial for their business. We should hardly be surprised to find, then, that smoking prevention brochures put out by the industry tend to be lame to the nth degree, a kind of rhetorical double-speak, with parents and kids being led to hear the same literal message in very different ways.
Parents are supposed to think the industry is talking straight about how “whacko” it is for kids to smoke, for example, when the ads have actually been carefully designed to deliver very different messages to parents and to kids. The industry’s “youth smoking prevention” campaigns often use this trick, which involves a calculated misuse of slang. The strategy has been to use slang that will sound “kid-like” to parents while being alien to contemporary youth (how many kids say “whacko”?). Ads of this sort also typically infantilize the nonsmoking “crowd” from which the kid is supposed to distance him- or herself. In one Reynolds ad from 1994, the smoking teen is told, “If you think smoking makes you fit in . . . think again.” The nonsmoking kids in the image—playing a game—are infantilized and definitely not cool: all are younger than the smoker; one sports a flattop; one even has to stand on tiptoe to reach the game. And one is wearing suspenders. How many cool kids wear suspenders? (See Figure 11.)
The utility of such a dual-rhetorical strategy was anticipated by the industry some twenty years earlier: Claude Teague in his memo calling for new brands “tailored to the youth market” had also called for “a careful study of the current youth jargon” to better appeal to the younger mind-set. Teague proposed that names for new youth appeal brands should ideally have a kind of double meaning, saying one thing to the young and something else to older folks—just as Marlboro suggested both independence to youngsters and hard-work virtues from “the good old days” to old-timers. Teague advised a search of “currently used high school American history books” to find good brand names and images for new cigarette brands. All for the purpose of developing “novel, useful cigarette systems.”72
Marketing to children has been notoriously successful. A 1991 study by the Medical College of Georgia found that by the age of six over 90 percent of American kids were able to recognize Joe Camel; nearly a third were able to do so by the age of three. Smokin’ Joe had about the same name (and face) recognition as Mickey Mouse. Joe Camel was one of the most successful ad campaigns in history: from the beginning of the blitz in 1987, Camel’s share of the under-eighteen market jumped from 0.5 to a whopping 33 percent in just three years. A Wall Street Journal article covering the story headlined, “Joe Camel Is Also Pied Piper.”73
Of course, one doesn’t have to market directly to children to entice them. Kids after all want to become adults, and we can hardly expect marketing to “young adults” not to influence people trying to act like adults. Reynolds realized this when it designed its Joe Camel campaign, which ended up capturing much of the young teen crowd while nominally appealing only to the eighteen and older set. Philip Morris quickly recognized this as a threat to its cowboy brand and tried to youthen its image in response. Here is how the company contrasted the appeal of Marlboro with that of Camel in 1992:
Marlboro Man |
Joe Camel |
HARD |
EASY |
SERIOUS |
FUNNY |
OUTDOORS |
URBAN |
WORK ETHIC |
PARTYING |
THEN—DELAYED GRATIFIATION [SIC] |
NOW |
UNCOMMUNICATIVE |
SOCIABLE |
OLDER |
YOUNGER |
THE BEST; ONLY A SELECT FEW |
EASY TO BELONG |
HANDSOME |
NON THREATENING |
A LOOK |
A PERSONALITY |
NEVER SMILES |
SMIRKS |
RESPECT |
SPONTANEOUS |
AN IDEAL |
REALITY |
CLASSIC |
COMMON |
LONG LASTING |
HERE TODAY |
OLD FASHIONED |
NEW |
STABLE |
EVER CHANGING |
INDIVIDUAL |
GROUP ORIENTED |
COUNTRY WOMEN |
TRENDY WOMEN |
SETTLED; MARRIED |
WILD; PLAYBOY |
MR. RIGHT |
MR. TONIGHT |
Bruce Willis, Jack Nicholson, Mickey Rourke, Dana Carvey, Warren Beatty, and Mick Jagger (“of his times”) were listed as embodying this Camel image, whereas Marlboro was more in the character of John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Chuck Norris, and Steven Segal.74
We should certainly not imagine, though, that every form of advertising involves youth marketing. The industry has marketed to women, children, and blacks—as we so often hear in patronizing tones—but also to Jews, the homeless, blue-collar workers, military men and women, gays and lesbians, physicians, nurses, hospital workers, the elderly, and dozens of other “segments.” Marketing targets (or proposed targets) have included affluent extroverts, “lazy greens,” “slackers,” “drifters,” “new traditionalists/nesters,” “the rich who need the extra nicotine,” “upscale intellectuals,” “middle tar downshifters,” “yuppie rejectors,” and “the breath conscious.” Reynolds has also targeted what it calls the “virile segment”—meaning younger males and notably military men but also “virile females.” Project Virile Female, for example, was a Reynolds effort developed by Promotional Marketing of Chicago to target blue-collar women with its Dakota brand, embracing the kind of girls who might like tractor pulls, hot-rod shows, and cruising and for whom “work is a job, not a career.” A 1995 Philip Morris marketing plan included Asians as “a viable audience to pursue” (and “previously untapped”) but also highlighted behavioral and “psychographic” indicators such as whether people owned pets, cooked for fun, dyed their hair, or wore gold jewelry. Segments are often broken down into subsegments, so Reynolds in the 1980s divided its youth market into Goody Goodies, Preps, GQs, DISCOs, Rockers, Party Parties, Punkers, and Burnouts. Monkeys and the dead would no doubt be targeted, if they were somehow able to cough up the cash. “They got lips, we want ’em,” is how the Marlboro Men once put it.75
Individual companies have spent a great deal of time deciding how to divide and conquer this territory. In Britain in the 1990s, for example, the Gallaher Group (makers of Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges) divided its market into “slobs” (27 percent), “aspiring sophisticates” (20 percent), “conservatives” (28 percent), and “worriers” (25 percent). RJR McDonald in Canada distinguished “Experimenters, Latent Quitters, Unselective Habituals, Selective Habituals and Ostriches.” R. J. Reynolds in the United States has distinguished Traditional, Virile, Refreshment (or Coolness), Stylish, Concerned, and Moderation segments. Reynolds and Philip Morris in the 1980s were considered dominant in the Virile market, with Reynolds playing second fiddle to Brown & Williamson in Coolness (Salem vs. Kool) and to Philip Morris in Moderation (Merit vs. Vantage). Philip Morris and Lorillard were strongest in the Stylish category, while Lorillard and American led in the Concerned segment (with Kent and Carlton, respectively). American Tobacco brought up the rear with its “Traditional” brands, Pall Mall and Luckies.76
A lot of psychology has gone into finding out how to sell cigarettes in different parts of the world. Researchers have explored the meaning of Marlboro for Arabs and how best to market cigarettes in postcommunist Poland or post-Mao China. Brand plans are often adjusted by geographic region—which is why we get gender-bender oddities like the fact that in South Korea Virginia Slims are smoked almost exclusively by men. BAT in the mid-1990s organized “a highly focused attack on student organisations with American Nights” (to recapture the Dutch student market from Gauloises Blondes). Studies have been done to explore the kinds of images that appeal to “value conscious” smokers, and scales have been developed to quantify the extent to which a particular product is judged acceptable—with “Hedonic Ratings” applied to fine-tune the system. Marketing segmentation is a much-studied science, which takes into account myriad different demo-, geo-, and psychographic variables. Reynolds in the 1990s defined “loyalty groups,” with “Camel Loyal Segments” ranging from “Committed” and “Frequent” to “Occasional,” “Non-Rejector,” and “Rejector.” The same company’s president in 1983 claimed to be able to segment its market “geographically, demographically, by brand style, even to the extent of the type of packaging preferred”—which in his view was why Camels were “on the verge of becoming a truly global power brand.”77
We also have instances in which the impact of specific promotions has been quantified. In 1974, for example, BAT reported on a campaign by its affiliate, Ceylon Tobacco, to promote its Bristol brand during the Esala Perahera, a religious festival held annually in Sri Lanka’s capital city of Kandy to honor the Sacred Tooth Relic of the Buddha, an object of veneration carried in a golden casket on the back of an elephant. BAT’s Marketing News described a campaign to market to the 1.5 million people crowded into the city to celebrate the festival as “an excellent opportunity for Ceylon Tobacco to promote its brands.” Traffic signs were installed featuring large and enticing images of Bristol cigarettes, and Rover Scouts—comparable to our Boy Scouts—sold the brand from handheld trays (“the only salesmen permitted by the authorities”). Prizes were awarded in the form of cigarettes and branded ashtrays, and refreshments were delivered to local police by vans in Bristol colors. Advertising was supposed to be barred from the event, but “the authorities allowed a BRISTOL spot to be broadcast at regular intervals,” along with the signage. The impact is expressed in BAT’s internal documents: “Total sales showed an increase of 22.5% over the previous year, with sales of BRISTOL over 100% better than a year before.” Not to mention value accrued in the form of goodwill toward the company and its products.78
Targeting opportunities have changed over time, of course. In the United States the industry was slow to exploit what it called the “Negro market,” for example, and in the 1940s was actually encouraged to cultivate this clientele as part of an effort to reduce juvenile delinquency. This odd suggestion was put forward by a PR firm specializing in Negro consumerism, a firm having as its motto, “Court the Negro Market—And Count the Results.” Reynolds was not impressed, responding that “Negroes read magazines we use and listen to radio programs—They are part of the general public and not a group set apart.” This may well have been a sensitive issue within the company, which had suffered racial turmoil following a series of labor uprisings in the early postwar era, blamed by the company on communist agitators. The civil rights movement soon thereafter made it hard (or easy?) to imagine how companies could have marketed brands with names like Nigger Head or Nigger Hair, products that ended up part of the American Tobacco empire in the early years of the twentieth century (originally manufactured by William Kimball and the Leidersdorf Co., respectively). Nigger Head cigarettes apparently didn’t survive the federally ordered trust bust of 1911, but Nigger Hair tobacco was selling at a robust rate of 425,000 pounds per year in Milwaukee in 1936,79 and survived for a disturbingly long time—into the 1960s, in fact, under the brand name Bigger Hair. (See Figure 13.)
Racism was common in the tobacco industry, especially in the Jim Crow South. Manufacturing tasks were typically segregated by race, with the dirtier jobs like stemming being assigned to African Americans while higher-paying jobs were reserved for whites. Racism can also be found in the language used in company documents: American Tobacco’s “Sold American” plan from the mid-1940s was supposed to instill employee pride in “the glories of the South, the glories of the southern planter and the glories of the southern plantation culture . . . all part of the ‘heritage’ of even the most ignorant negro.”80
Money is money, though, and beginning in the 1950s, and especially after the onset of the civil rights movement, a great deal of energy was put into capturing the Negro dollar (or “southern Negro market”). Not without some resistance, however. Ads were placed on African American radio and in African American magazines, drawing the odd ire of white supremacists who protested Philip Morris’s support for the Urban League and efforts to make Philip Morris the “negro cigarette.” Philip Morris was already strong in this niche, with 27 percent of the African American market, making it second only to Camel’s 29 percent—and we should recall that Philip Morris was a much smaller company back then. The Ku Klux Klan managed to have its voice heard in this realm, judging from a New York Post report that “at a cross-burning ceremony in a field near Charlotte, an unidentified grand klaliff exhorted his white-robed listeners to refuse to buy from ‘nigger lovers.’ ” The boycott was supposed to include the Ford Motor Company, Carnation Milk, and Philip Morris, all of whom had contributed to the NAACP.81 (Times change, and it is worth noting that Philip Morris in 1936 had registered and sold a Clansman brand, which apparently was not much of a success.)
Menthol brands became popular with African Americans in the 1960s, though sales to blacks lagged behind sales to whites up until the 1970s. A Reynolds document from 1966 talks about “Negro problem markets,” meaning areas in which purchases by blacks trailed those in other parts of the country. Philip Morris in the 1970s puzzled over why its Marlboro Greens (menthols) were selling so well in Grand Rapids, Michigan; a study found that “almost all Marlboro Green was being purchased by teenagers” (especially at convenience stores near high schools) but also that whites in at least one high school were denigrating Kools as the “nigger cigarette.”82
It is not entirely clear why menthol brands became so popular with African Americans. The argument has been made that menthols joined a longer list of traditional Negro cold remedies, but it’s not clear how much evidence there is for this. We do know that the industry by the late 1950s was starting to market menthols to blacks: Lorillard targeted African Americans with its Newport brand, for example, distributing cigarettes free of charge from trucks that would roll into urban housing projects, sort of like the old ice-cream trucks. We also know that the industry had some bizarre notions about why blacks liked menthols. The strangest may be the one a Lorillard employee came up with, preserved for eternity in a 1970 marketing document titled “Why Menthols?” in which we’re told that the menthol attraction might have something to do with a “mythical” Negro body odor:
Negroes, as the story goes, are said to be possessed by an almost genetic body odor.
Now whether or not this is real is irrelevant. More importantly, Negroes recognize the existence of this “myth.” And they realize that “Whitey” does, too.
Now what does this have to do with menthol cigarettes? Here’s the theory.
Negroes smoke menthols to make their breath feel fresh. To mask this real/mythical odor.
Let’s examine this theory a little. First . . .83
And off we go into racist fantasyland. This same document notes that African Americans at this time were slightly more likely to smoke than whites, that 30 percent of all smokers of Kool were African Americans, and that peppermint candies were especially popular in Harlem—with Mason Mints selling “as if they were being endorsed by Adam Clayton Powell” (the popular Harlem congressman). There is no mention of the fact that blacks were more likely than whites to die from smoking or that magazines such as Ebony and Jet earned a higher fraction of their advertising revenue from cigarettes than did comparable white publications.
Code words or shorthand was often used when referring to distinct segments. Companies talked about the “BHM” (Black + Hispanic market), “ethnic” markets, and the like. Camel cigarettes in the 1960s and 1970s were supposed to be for “NFF smokers,” meaning “normal full flavor” smokers. Cigarettes were also designed in such a way as to be more attractive to specific targets. Project BIG BOY, for example, was a Brown & Williamson campaign to market a “larger circumference cigarette” to smokers who needed “macho/assertive image enhancement,” especially “blue collar, adult male smokers likely to work in construction or similar jobs.” A great deal of attention was paid to military markets, since by the 1980s military personnel on average smoked about twice as many cigarettes as the civilian population. Brown & Williamson at this time had an entire “Special Markets Department”—with about fifty account managers—devoted exclusively to military sales. Lorillard was also enthralled by the military market, especially for its black-attract Newport brand. A 1983 Lorillard memo outlined a program of aggressive face-to-face promotions targeting military personnel, commenting that “the plums are here to be plucked.”84
Much of this marketing literature deals in rather coarse stereotypes. Blacks and Hispanics are treated as falling into the “Coolness” and “Virile” segments, for example, whereas Jews were said to prefer brands that “most successfully reinforce independence, confidence and upward mobility” (Vantage, Salem, and Now were considered “priority brands in the Jewish market”). R. J. Reynolds in a 1982 management summary observed that the “Virile” segment was “the largest among Hispanics, accounting for 45 percent of Hispanic smoker’s usership.” Younger adult males were the target, with the archetypal occupation being the construction foreman. The “Stylish” segment was more likely to respond to images of fashion models and Cadillacs, a lifestyle especially appealing to Hispanics, “who tend to operate more on a ‘fantasy’ level.” Gender was often a focus: tobacco researchers in the 1970s found that Winstons were seen as more feminine (Doris Day), whereas Marlboros were more masculine (Clint Eastwood).85
Other groups were shoehorned into such schemes. Jewish smokers, for example, according to a 1984 market survey, “tend to gravitate towards lower tar brands,” explaining why, for Hebrews at least, brands in the “Moderation and Concerned segments” had the highest market share, whereas “the fuller flavored Virile and Traditional brands don’t fare as well.” Jews thus chose Camels over Marlboros, Vantage over Merit, and (among the women) Mores over Virginia Slims. Philip Morris, with its focus on sociability and “having fun,” was faring poorly in this Jewish market. Reynolds concluded that it should continue its special promotions in the New York metropolitan area, while “other areas with high Jewish populations should be investigated for similar programs.” The company had earlier scored against Jews with its Winston brand, which in 1962 radio ads was deliberately pushed to the Yiddishen taam (Jewish taste) segment.86
We need to think more about how advertising images of this sort may have helped to reinforce stereotypes of race, class, and gender, or even what it means to be cool, gritty, sexy, rebellious, or avant-garde. Billions of dollars have gone into campaigns to identify specific types of cigarettes with particular kinds of people. “Stylish” cigarettes were “long in length and high in tar with a fashion model, elegant, high class image”; “moderation” and “concerned” cigarettes were generally short, non-mentholated, and “low in tar with a doctor, career woman, sensible, in control image.” Coolness was typically conveyed through menthol—especially to African Americans—whereas traditional and virile cigarettes were high-tar regulars with “a tough, rugged male image.” And “short in length.” The kinds of jobs and clothing preferred by smokers of particular kinds of cigarettes were detailed, along with cigarette-specific political affiliations—as in cigarettes that would be popular with liberals, conservatives, or “worriers.” Reynolds according to one 1976 survey was weak among liberals, “slightly above average among conservatives,” and “strong among the smaller worrier segment.” Young males were targeted by glorifying risk (hang gliding, mountain climbing); young females were promised a slim physique and sham political parity: “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Lorillard in 1973 distinguished eight different segments in its female market, along a sliding scale from “Emotional Bra-Burning Extremists” and “Blatant Lesbians” to “Traditional Women” and “Anti-Libbers.”87
Smoking has been called “a wordless but eloquent form of expression . . . fully coded, rhetorically complex . . . with a vast repertoire of well-understood conventions.”88 But if that is so, it is largely because marketing professionals have made it so, to augment sales. Admen skilled in the arts have managed to take an essentially homogeneous product—blindfolded tests show you really can’t distinguish one brand from another—and imbue it with elaborately differentiated symbolic powers. It is not a natural thing to smoke; people start when young because they have been led to believe it is fashionable or rebellious, and they continue because they become addicted. Marketing joins with psychopharmacology to transform a rare or ritual indulgence into brain-rewiring mega-morbidity. The imperative is alkaloid, but the fantasies are cloaked in illusion and the product of human craft.
